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How jumping genes were discovered

Nature Structural Biology volume 8, pages 300–301 (2001)Cite this article

The discovery of transposition can be dated quite precisely from comments penned in Barbara McClintock's hand on an unpublished manuscript from January of 1949. Seeking to explain the behavior of a chromosome breaking site she named the Dissociation (Ds) locus, McClintock says: “At the time, I did not know that Ds could change its location. Realization of this did not enter my consciousness until late this spring, following the harvest of the greenhouse crop”1. The spring was that of 1948 and the greenhouse crop was grown in the winter 1947–1948.

While it was McClintock's unique insight that certain genetic elements move around or transpose, the kinds of unstable mutations now known to be caused by transposons had been studied for many decades. The maize geneticist Emerson (1914) worked with a type of corn whose kernels showed stripes of dark red pigmentation2. Although earlier geneticists had failed, Emerson was able to understand the behavior of such an unstable mutation within the Mendelian paradigm. He suggested that it was the result of a transient association of an inhibiting factor with a gene required for pigmentation and that this interaction gave rise to the unpigmented phenotype. He further postulated that the factor could lose its power to inhibit the gene during development, thus explaining the origin of pigmented sectors and fully pigmented kernels. But he could not imagine what this inhibitor could be. Later Rhoades (1941) made the important observation that a certain stable null mutation at the maize A locus became unstable when combined with a locus he designated Dotted3.

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References

  1. McClintock, B. The discovery and characterization of transposable elements. The collected papers of Barbara McClintock. (Garland, New York;1987).

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  2. Emerson, R. A. Am. Nat. 48, 87–115 (1914).

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  3. Rhoades, M. M. Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 9, 138–144 (1941).

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  4. Fedoroff, N. In Mobile DNA (eds Howe, M. & Berg, D.) 375–411 (American Society for Microbiology, Washington; 1989).

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  1. Life Sciences Consortium and Biotechnology Institute,

    Nina Fedoroff

  2. Biology Department, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, USA

    Nina Fedoroff

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  1. Nina Fedoroff
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Fedoroff, N. How jumping genes were discovered. Nat Struct Mol Biol 8, 300–301 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/86161

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